Cities as Brands, Architecture as Revolution: My Conversation with Rahul Mehrotra
When architects stop thinking about buildings and start thinking about societies
The Curious Nobody
May 2025
What happens when you rename a city?
This question led me down a rabbit hole and eventually to a fascinating conversation with Rahul Mehrotra, architect, urban designer, and professor at Harvard. The conversation started with names but evolved into something much larger—how we build societies that actually work for the people living in them.
I started with a simple AI program to calculate the cost of changing Bombay to Mumbai. The conservative estimate? 172 crores in taxpayer money just for changing signboards. But as Rahul pointed out to me, there's something much bigger at stake here.
"Would Johnny Walker Whiskey change his name after building a brand for two generations?" he asked.
Cities are brands. Bombay meant something. It resonated internationally. It carried cultural weight. The erasure of that brand value might be the real cost. Fascinating detail: airline codes still read "BOM" and Beijing remains "PEK" instead of "BEJ." Even the systems designed to be purely functional recognize what politicians seem eager to forget: names carry meaning beyond politics.
The Architecture of Control
But our conversation quickly moved beyond nomenclature to something more fundamental: how do we design cities that actually work for people?
Rahul introduced me to a concept that's been rattling around in my brain ever since—the idea of architects as creators of "spatial imagination." It's not just about designing buildings. It's about painting a picture of what could be, creating images compelling enough that people work toward them collectively.
Here's the kicker: Indian architects, by and large, have abdicated this responsibility. They wear blinkers, look at their specific site, calculate the FSI (Floor Space Index), leave the mandatory setbacks, and build. They don't think about how their building relates to the street, the neighborhood, the district, the city.
"Society invests in doctors to keep society in better health," Rahul explained. "Society invests in architects and urban designers to imagine better spatial possibilities and ways we can make those spaces."
We haven't taken that mission seriously.
The Feedback Loop We're Missing
Rahul sees urban design as a "bridge practice"—a feedback loop between the site-specific nature of architecture and the abstraction of planning policy. When a planning department increases FSI by one, it seems innocuous on paper. But that can mean buildings jumping from eight stories to sixteen, doubling density overnight with no corresponding infrastructure improvements.
Urban designers should be the ones screaming: "Wait! Do you realize what this means for water supply? For traffic? For quality of life?"
But who's listening?
Civil Society: The Missing Ingredient
The most striking part of our conversation was about civil society—that layer between government and citizens that has the empathy for grassroots issues but the education and networks to negotiate with power.
Mumbai, Rahul noted, has a strong tradition of this. Trade unions, NGOs, citizen groups—they create the feedback loops that keep the city somewhat functional despite everything working against it. They're the reason Mumbai feels more integrated than cities like Bangalore, where you can literally draw lines separating Hindu, Muslim, and Christian neighborhoods.
When I think about my time in Bangalore, this rings painfully true. The city is stratified in ways that feel almost medieval. Meanwhile, Mumbai—for all its chaos—forces interaction. The density itself becomes a democratizing force.
The Hidden Cities of India
Here's where things get truly mind-bending. Rahul's research reveals that while we obsess over 30-40 major cities, there are 2,500 official towns in India and—wait for it—over 15,000 settlements that should be classified as towns but remain villages on paper.
Why? Because India's criteria for what constitutes a town are bizarrely outdated:
5,000 people (fair enough)
400 people per square kilometer (higher density than Greater Houston!)
75% of males in non-agricultural employment (this basically doesn't exist anywhere)
The result? Places with 150,000 people are still classified as villages, run by five-person panchayats, with no municipal services, no public health infrastructure, no urban planning.
Meanwhile, the 30-40 "black hole" cities suck up all the resources, building flyover after flyover, metro systems that devastate neighborhoods, airports with cutting-edge technology where you still wait in mile-long lines because the security guard checks passports like he's "reading the Bhagavad Gita."
Low-Tech Solutions in a High-Tech World
When Rahul designed an IT campus for Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore, he did something radical—he refused to air-condition everything. Instead of five separate glass-clad blocks with A/C throughout, he created a three-floor "high street" that connected everything, forcing social interaction and cutting air conditioning needs by more than half.
The LEED certification people were baffled. How could a building be green without air-conditioning everything? But Rahul's team achieved 650 square feet per ton of cooling (compared to the standard 200) not through high-tech efficiency but by simply not cooling spaces that didn't need it.
"You've got an air-conditioned city," he told them. "What are you doing air-conditioning for?"
The Four Ways We Build
Perhaps most fascinating was Rahul's categorization of how architecture happens in modern India:
Global Practice: The architecture of "impatient capital"—Dubai-style glass towers that could be anywhere
Regional Practice: Modern architecture with local sensitivity (where Rahul places himself)
Alternative Practice: Collaborative, drawing-light approaches working with local craftspeople
Counter-Modernism: Ancient-looking temples built with Toyota's just-in-time manufacturing
"None of them is better than the other," he insists. "They all have their value. The challenge is making them coexist coherently."
But right now? It's what he calls a "sack of honey"—a high-rise next to a slum next to a temple next to who-knows-what, with no coherence whatsoever.
Why This Matters Now
As I publish this conversation, I'm acutely aware it won't go viral. These aren't the hot takes that drive engagement. But I'm convinced these ideas—these blueprints for how to build functional societies—will become critical as AI reshapes our world.
When we inevitably need to reallocate resources in an AI-driven economy, when we need models for creating meaningful human spaces in an increasingly digital world, we'll need to look back at people like Rahul who figured out how to engineer social harmony through thoughtful design.
In the messiness of India, amid all the dysfunction and chaos, there are people proving that architecture isn't just about buildings. It's about creating the spatial conditions for human flourishing. It's about building feedback loops between power and people. It's about recognizing that cities aren't found—they're made.
And maybe, just maybe, it's about remembering that before we renamed everything in a fit of regional pride, before we built flyovers to nowhere, before we confused modernization with westernization, we need to ask a simple question:
What kind of spaces help humans live better together?
The answer won't be found in Dubai's glass towers or Singapore's managed perfection. It'll emerge from the controlled chaos of places like Jaipur's grid or Chandigarh's evolved orderliness—that "perfect balance between chaos and order" that Rahul says India needs.
These conversations may not be popular now. But I have a feeling that in a future where human connection becomes increasingly precious, the architects who thought about society rather than just structures will be the ones we turn to for wisdom.
After all, as Rahul reminded me, we're not just building cities. We're building the stages where human life unfolds.
And that's a responsibility too important to leave to chance—or to politicians with a penchant for renaming things.
Watch the full conversation with Rahul Mehrotra on The Idea Sandbox YouTube channel. For more explorations at the intersection of technology, society, and human potential, visit tisb.world.
Have thoughts on urban design, civil society, or why your city works (or doesn't)? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.